Tonight's full moon

Supermoon lunar eclipse 28 September 2015

I set my alarm early this morning (at 3:45 am) so that I could watch the supermoon lunar eclipse here in Oslo Norway. The last time there was a lunar eclipse of a supermoon was in 1982; the next one won't happen until 2033. Strange to think about that--where will we be in 2033? So it was worth the loss of sleep to get up early to witness this beautiful and rare event. Night photography is not easy, as I've talked about before. While I took a lot of photos, only a few were good, and even they were not as optimal as I'd hoped they'd be. But I hope you enjoy them.

taken at 3:56 am

taken at 4:20 am

taken at 4:52 am 

Some of Ray Bradbury's reflections about life

The National Endowment for the Arts posted these quotes by Ray Bradbury on their blog the other day (25 September 2015). I thought the quotes were very good, and wanted to share them with you. Here they are reprinted from their blog http://arts.gov/art-works/2015/our-top-ten-ray-bradbury-quotes. 

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Stuff your eyes with wonder,’ he said, ‘live as if you'd drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It's more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories.

We are cups, constantly and quietly being filled. The trick is, knowing how to tip ourselves over and let the beautiful stuff out.

Don't think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity. It's self-conscious, and anything self-conscious is lousy. You can't try to do things. You simply must do things.

We are an impossibility in an impossible universe.

I spent three days a week for ten years educating myself in the public library, and it's better than college. People should educate themselves - you can get a complete education for no money. At the end of ten years, I had read every book in the library and I'd written a thousand stories.

There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.

I'm never going to go to Mars, but I've helped inspire, thank goodness, the people who built the rockets and sent our photographic equipment off to Mars.

Don’t worry about things. Don’t push. Just do your work and you’ll survive. The important thing is to have a ball, to be joyful, to be loving and to be explosive. Out of that comes everything and you grow.

I don’t believe in being serious about anything. I think life is too serious to be taken seriously.

You've been put on the world to love the act of being alive.

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A very good poem--The Second Coming--by William Butler Yeats

The Second Coming



Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.




Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again; but now I know

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

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Why is it that I think that this poem by William Butler Yeats becomes more relevant for our world for each year that passes? Is it because I am getting older that I am beginning to really see the anarchy in the world and the blatant disregard for the life around us--be it human, animal, bird, fish or insect? We are polluting our planet with pesticides that are killing the bees and butterflies. Without the bees to pollinate crops, there will be fewer types of the fruits and vegetables that we at present take for granted. It will affect food production on a global scale. This is one problem. Another problem is that these pesticides are finding their way into our drinking water, and they will cause more damage to all life that way in the form of increased cancer risk and other health problems. We don't need these chemicals inside us, nor do animals, fish, birds and insects. The things we do in this life and the way we behave toward the life around us affect the lives around us. We are not the inhabitants of an island; everything we do and say has an effect on the life around us. We need to wake up and really 'see' that fact. If we see it, then it becomes a no-brainer that we need to take care of the life on this planet, for ourselves and future generations. I am glad to see that there are movements in society that are focusing on locally-grown organic farm products. I am also glad to see that many people want to know where their meat and produce come from and how they were treated before they were made available to consumers. Every bit of knowledge helps us to grow and to evolve into a society that is not preoccupied with making huge profits at the expense of our planet's future. Because we need to ask ourselves, as Yeats did--what is the beast that is moving slowly toward Bethlehem to be born? And what will happen to mankind when it is born?

If you need a good laugh today

This was my laugh for the day--it's a great little video (posted by Mark Muldoon on YouTube) of a male cockatoo that loves Elvis, and the female by his side that doesn't! And she isn't too interested in the male either!

Anxiety and dread in Fear the Walking Dead

I’m already hooked on the new TV series--Fear the Walking Dead (the prequel to The Walking Dead)—after only two episodes. I’ve read that there will be six episodes this season; it’s already been renewed for a second season. Unlike The Walking Dead that takes place in Georgia, Fear the Walking Dead takes place in Los Angeles and depicts how the apocalyptic zombie plague got its start as a flu-like virus that spreads rapidly together with the anxiety and paranoia that accompany it. Anxiety and a sense of mounting dread pervade the show; it’s not hard to imagine similar feelings if a disease like the plague spread rapidly throughout a large city and wreaked havoc on its populace. How might we react to such a plague, that the authorities would not be able to fight effectively or adequately inform the public about? How would we protect ourselves and our families? How would we survive, and what would we prioritize?

We know what’s coming in the next few episodes, since this is a prequel; we know from The Walking Dead that it’s going to be impossible to stop the zombie apocalypse. A huge city like Los Angeles and a large high school are not the first places we might expect to be creepy in broad daylight, but in this show, they are downright creepy. You half expect a zombie to appear around every corner in the high school or in the dark passageways under the highway overpasses that abound in the city. An abandoned church also ups the ‘creep you out’ factor; not surprising since this is where the first episode begins—in an abandoned church frequented by drug addicts who squat there. When Nick (played by Frank Dillane) awakes from his drug-induced sleep, his girlfriend Gloria is no longer beside him and he goes looking for her inside the church. He hears screams and goes toward those sounds, thinking that Gloria might be in trouble. When he finds her, she is no longer the girlfriend he used to know, and what he sees shocks him into wanting to get sober. He hightails it out of the church and ends up in the hospital after getting hit by a car. When his hospital roommate dies (surely an eventual zombie, implied but not shown), he escapes the hospital amid all the commotion and gets in touch with his friend and drug dealer, Calvin, who sold him the drugs. He thinks maybe he has been given drugs laced with PCP. Russell doesn’t like what he hears, and decides to take Nick out because he is afraid he will go to the police. But in a twist of fate, Calvin ends up dead, shot by his own gun, and Nick ends up alive. In the meantime, Nick's mother and her boyfriend (Madison and Travis, played by Kim Dickens and Cliff Davis, respectively) are searching for him; they have gone to the church to see for themselves what it is he has described to them (Gloria’s murderous rampage), and when they see a large pool of blood on the floor of the church, they understand that something bad has happened there. They drive around the seedier sections of the city trying to find Nick, and eventually they do, at a tunnel entrance to a storm drain. When he tells them that he has killed Calvin, they go to the scene of the shooting, only to find that Calvin is gone. What ensues convinces them that something horrific is afoot, and that they need to take what is happening around them seriously. 

The characters are believable, and behave for the most part in ways I can relate to. Trying to get one’s family members together in one location when a catastrophe strikes, being separated from those you love while doing so, trying to understand what is happening around you when you have very little time to reflect, and trying to decide whether you should provide help to others or just protect yourself and your family. These are issues that most of us can relate to. It will be interesting to see where this show takes us. I can definitely envision enough material for one season; I have a harder time understanding what the second season will focus on. But so far so good; I’m looking forward to the third episode. I’ve got to wonder though, why so many people, myself included, are watching shows with apocalyptic themes; is it an acknowledgment of the fact that we really cannot control the world around us, much as we think we can? Nature (tornadoes, earthquakes, tsunamis), pandemics (infectious diseases) or even certain groups within society (terrorists, gangs, etc.) do what they do whenever and wherever they want, and we have little to no control over them. 

The end of summer

I have a feeling that autumn will come early to Oslo this year. This past week we had a lot of rain, and what I would have termed a mini-hurricane on Wednesday, with strong winds and stormy weather. The clouds looked threatening, so all in all, it signaled the end of summer, at least to me. Temperatures have become cooler; we’re down to around sixty degrees Fahrenheit during the afternoons, the warmest time of day. We had friends from Illinois visiting us for a few days at the end of August; luckily they flew out of Oslo about half a day before the weather turned from nice to stormy. While they were here, the weather was lovely, and that always helps to give a nice impression of Oslo. We enjoyed our visit together, and I spent some time showing them my Oslo—the small little places that tourists would not really know about. One of those places is Hønsa Lovisas house, a small little red house on the Akerselva River, not far from where we live, which used to be a residence and is now a cozy little café that serves very good waffles with jam and sour cream. It is also an art gallery for different kinds of modern art exhibitions. You can read more about it here, but for my non-Norwegian readers, the website is in Norwegian, so you’ll have to translate it using Google Translate (http://www.honselovisashus.no/html_sider/10_HJEM.html). It’s a nice place to spend an hour or so relaxing on a Sunday afternoon.

I realized today that I am a ‘four-seasons’ person. I look forward to the change of seasons and what each season brings. I would not want to live all-year round in a hot climate. My sister has discovered the same; the hot southern states are not for her. She prefers upstate NY. Autumn is always a reminder of the promise of a new school year; while I am no longer a student, I still like the feeling of a ‘new start’—projects around the house, new recipes to try, new photography projects. I look forward to the leaves changing color, to Halloween, to Thanksgiving, to walking outdoors in the cooler weather. Christmas arrives with winter, and that is always something to look forward to—buying gifts, making food, celebrating the holiday with loved ones. Plus the evenings are darker and longer, so it makes viewing the skies much easier with my telescope. I’ll be looking for Jupiter, Mars and Venus this winter. Spring signals rebirth; next spring, we may finally get our city parcel garden (we’ve been on the waiting list for six years), which will enable us to plant vegetables and flowers and tend to them. We’re looking forward to that and to seeing what kind of harvest we’ll get. Our discussions now revolve around what kind of vegetables and flowers we want to plant; we may plant an apple tree and a raspberry bush. And then of course there is summer to look forward to—my annual trip to NY to visit my friends and family, as well as vacation here in Norway or in another European country. I soak in the warmth of summer, to prepare me for the cold of winter. I could not face winter without having had the warmth of summer. I am glad to be able to experience all the seasons; as my mother used to say, each season has its charm.

A new poem for my brother

Moving on

Seven months have come and gone

Months you did not get to see

All the life that once was yours

Weeks gone by, life moved on

Thinking of you, not forgotten

But then there are those sudden thoughts

A hand grips tightly round my heart

Is life’s struggle all for naught?

Were your life and death in vain?

So unfair, your early exit

Left behind uncertain fates

And sad hearts that know of pain

Seven months have come and gone

Those in your life move on without you

I see you in my mind’s eye alone

I wish I could have protected you

copyright 2015

Paula M. De Angelis